Video Game Artist

Guitar Hero and Band Hero

The final few months at Underground were extremely frustrating for everybody as we went from potential project to potential project. During that time we worked on many demos for products within the Guitar Hero or Band Hero franchise. This post contains a lot of the work done in that time.

Guitar Hero 7

Of all the things we did at Underground (Z-Axis) this demo is probably the work that I’m most proud of. My directive for this was to come up with a visual look for a Guitar Hero game that would breathe fresh life into the franchise without requiring us to re-do all of the work that was done before (like all the Create a Rocker costumes), and was something we could easily replicate for as much as 80 songs on a tight deadline and a tiny staff. What you see here was done in a month completely in-game except for two notable After Effects ‘paint overs’.

When we started work on Band Hero I was told that the company wanted this product to have a distinct look that separated it from the Guitar Hero line. They were looking for something a little less edgy and more family friendly. With that in mind we went after everything from characters to environments, fonts to UI. These videos show where we ended up after about two months of solid, directed work.

Here is a very rough animatic for a Guitar Hero intro sequence. One of the things I really wanted to do with this product is go back to really celebrating the core cast of characters and since we were thinking of adding some very light RPG meta game elements we thought that we could weave the core cast into the players story.